Picking fights

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Underpinning much of what the UK government is doing currently, there seems to be an almost desperate and somewhat indiscriminate need to pick fights with people. Perhaps their internal polling, or their focus groups, have been telling them that taking a macho stance against all comers will bring electoral rewards amongst their target groups, but there is little evidence to suggest that such a finding is backed up by information available publicly. Perhaps it’s even more simplistic than that – they are just harking back to the Iron Lady without studying the detail of the way she chose her fights. Whatever the reason, picking fights once positions have been taken, with no attempt to avoid the need for them by advance discussions, seems to have become their default position.

It's possible that they genuinely believed that the public would turn against strikers as the inconvenience caused increases, and maybe – had it been only the railways involved – that might have worked. But taking on the nurses in particular was just foolish. Eventually, they will have to settle; they won’t give the RCN everything it asked for (but being accustomed to the idea of negotiation, the RCN never expected that), but they will have to make some serious concessions, however they attempt to spin them. And having settled one dispute in that fashion, they will have to settle the others in a similar way (the Chancellor’s reported concerns that settling one dispute will lead to a domino effect are valid, but it’s the government which lined up the dominos). Had they only been willing to sit down and negotiate properly before the first strikes, it could probably all have been avoided; turning it into a fight looks to be deliberate.

Yesterday, they announced that they will block the Gender Recognition Bill passed by the Scottish parliament, teeing up another entirely avoidable fight. They could have expressed their concerns in advance and tried to discuss potential changes with the Scottish Government, but chose to wait until the Bill had been overwhelmingly passed by the parliament before using the nuclear option of over-riding the democratic voice of Scotland. It will, undoubtedly, end up in the Supreme Court. It’s not entirely clear who will win the legal argument, but there can be little doubt that the Scottish Government will win the political argument.

And there’s also, of course, the long-running (three Prime Ministers and counting) dispute with the EU over the Brexit terms, another area in which concessions will eventually have to come.

There are times when picking fights might be a sensible strategy for a party or a government, which can look ‘strong’ (apparently that’s a good thing among the electorate) as a result, but only if it wins a reasonable proportion of them. Repeatedly picking fights which it is easy to predict it is doomed to lose can only have the opposite effect. The Tory Party has become not so much a government as a suicide cult. As Richard Murphy points out today, looking at the main elements of their legislative programme, one might easily conclude that they are governing for the world as they wish it were rather than the world as it actually exists. Fantasy has become the new normal.

Competing in the madness stakes

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There are two facts about nurses and doctors with which very few would disagree. The first is that it takes years and costs tens of thousands of pounds to train them, and the second is that there is a critical shortage of both, with large numbers of unfilled vacancies in the NHS. With that as context, try as I might, I really struggle to imagine the ministerial conversations which concluded that threatening to sack any nurse or doctor who refuses to provide a better service on strike days than the currently-resourced NHS is able to provide on non-strike days is such a brilliant idea that it should be made law. Of course, it wouldn’t be ministers doing the sacking, it would be their appointees on the health boards and trusts to whom that responsibility would be delegated but, again, I really can’t imagine the thought process that managers in such trusts would go through which would lead to them actually issuing any dismissal notices. Not only would it completely poison future industrial relations, it would make their job of meeting the myriad targets placed upon them by the various governments of the UK even harder than the current setting of ‘impossible’.

One of the two semi-rational reasons that I have been able to come up with is that the UK ministers seriously believe that the deterrent effect will be so great that striking workers will agree to meet whatever arbitrary service levels ministers will set such that employers will never ever want to use the power which the government is seeking to grant them. It’s certainly credible that ‘employers will never ever want to use the power’; most of them have more sense than that. But that reluctance to use the power bears little relationship to the question of whether the strikers comply with the arbitrary service levels or not, and has much more to do with the application of a little common sense. That leaves us with the idea of ‘deterrence’ as a guiding principle.

It's something on which the current government certainly has form. The whole policy of sending a tiny number of migrants to an African country with which they previously have no connection was all about deterrence as well. It was supposed to destroy the business model of people smugglers by convincing the migrants that the consequences of getting into a small boat were worse than simply staying put. To say that the evidence for this assertion is lacking would be a considerable understatement. The government clearly has no conception of the degree of desperation felt by people prepared to risk their own lives and those of their children by getting into a small boat and crossing the channel; the idea that a tiny risk of being sent to Rwanda would deter them tells us more about the mindset of the ministers than that of the migrants.

To the extent that deterrence works at all, it depends on a number of factors. Those taking the action that is supposed to be deterred have to be taking the decision on the basis of a careful risk analysis and weighing up the likelihood of negative consequences (rather than acting out of desperation), and they have to really believe that those consequences will certainly follow. In the case of NHS workers, they are as able as anyone else to understand that employers who sack them for striking would have to be even more insane than the ministers devising the policy.

That leaves the other semi-rational reason, which is that the government seriously believes that restricting the rights of working people is always, and in all circumstances, going to be a vote winner for the Tory party. Even Thatcher realised that wasn’t true and chose her battles carefully, but those who seek to emulate her clearly have only a partial understanding of history. Perhaps they’re too focussed on mathematics.

Labour declining to use the power it already has?

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Leaving aside the not entirely irrelevant fact that Rishi Sunak has trouble with his arithmetic and a tendency to invent whichever numbers suit his argument at the time (he is just following the well-known tradition that 89.6% of all politicians’ statistics are, like this one, entirely made up), his claim that it would cost every household £1000 “to meet the pay demands of the union bosses” repeats the rhetoric which the government uses repeatedly, which seeks to pretend that this is all about ‘union barons’ rather than union members, aka ‘workers’. It’s a deliberate attempt to distance the working people involved from their ‘union bosses’ (who, in reality, are actually the servants of the workers, not their bosses – their actual bosses are the tight-fisted employers), but it’s a trick which works, not least because the BBC and press follow the line of talking about this as a dispute between ‘unions’ and employers rather than between workers and employers. It also, of course, draws a line between those ‘hard-working people’ who are disadvantaged by strikes, and those ‘evil’ trade union barons who seek only to ‘disrupt’. One of the reasons why it’s been so effective for decades is that ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’ are so pathetically afraid of the media that they are unwilling to call out this trick for the sleight of hand which it is, and unwilling to support working people seeking to maintain and improve their standard of living.

Any industrial dispute is, ultimately, about power, or rather the balance of power enjoyed by employers on the one hand and employees on the other. And successive governments – of both parties – have consistently tried to shift that balance away from workers whilst strengthening the hand of employers. That is what all the anti-trade union and anti-strike legislation has always been about, whether it comes from Thatcher or her predecessors – never forget Barbara Castle and her ‘In Place of Strife’ Bill. The way that UK society has become more unequal, with those at the top hoarding ever greater amounts of wealth, whilst those at the bottom struggle, isn’t an accident, and wasn’t inevitable. It is a direct result of that shift in the balance of power. Austerity for the many and obscene wealth for the few has been inherent in the Labour-Tory philosophy for decades.

There are signs that at least some of the public are beginning to see the light, particularly in relation to workers in the NHS. The hypocrisy of giving them a round of applause once a week during the worst of the pandemic and grinding down their standard of living now is difficult for Sunak to conceal; of all the battles he could have picked, this looks like the most unwise of all, and underlines how far his lifestyle is from that of most of those he seeks to rule. Responding to pay claims by attempting to further restrict the power of working people by banning strikes or trying to impose minimum service levels which must be maintained rather than seeking a negotiated settlement is an attempt to divide and rule which might play well with Telegraph readers, but appears to be having the reverse effect on wider public opinion. And it doesn’t help his case that he showed – as he regularly boasts – during the pandemic (to say nothing of the response to the war in Ukraine) that availability of money isn’t a problem for the government; how money is used is ultimately a political question, not a financial one.

Despite all of that, there is actually a good case to be made for seeking to prevent strikes in certain essential services; but to do so in a fair and just society requires a quid pro quo, and that quid pro quo can only be an absolute cast-iron guarantee to protect the living standards, in absolute as well as relative terms, of those working in those services. Telling those employees that they have no choice; they must accept a decrease in their standard of living and they cannot act collectively in an attempt to maintain that standard is a recipe for social division rather than harmony. It’s also counter-productive in the short to medium term – with the economy close to full employment, lower paid people in the public services can, and some probably will, vote with their feet. Restricting immigration to please the racists and zenophobes amongst their supporters merely compounds the problem. But that must be as obvious to Sunak as it is to others, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that that is the outcome he seeks. If someone wanted to destroy public services, including the NHS, and replace them with services run for profit, what would they do differently to Sunak?

Despite not being in government, the Labour Party is currently in a position of unprecedented power for an opposition party. With the increasing certainty that they will be forming the government in less than two years’ time, setting out clearly that they would reverse some policies would make it much harder for those charged with implementing them to actually do so. Perhaps the most obvious example is the new coal mine in Cumbria. If investors, even those as far away as the Caymans looking to avoid tax on their profits, felt a high degree of certainty that the project was going to be cancelled in two years, would they really still invest? Even in the public sector, why rush to make things happen now when you know that they’ll only be reversed in a matter of months? Labour’s unwillingness to use that power is astounding – and more than a little worrying for those of us who want to see significant change rather then mere tinkering.

Still dividing, still ruling

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Divide and rule is probably the oldest trick in the book for the ruling elite, yet still they get away with it. It is such an obvious trick that one might think people would start to see through it, but enough people seem to fall for it every time to allow the elite to maintain their grip on society. Control of the media is clearly a part of the trick, but the gullibility of large numbers is probably more important. And social media – which theoretically provide an opportunity for alternative views to those expressed in the main stream media – are filled with the views of the gullible, acting as willing shills in their own oppression. The rail dispute is more complex than much of the more simplistic reporting suggests; arguments over the replacement of people with technology and new working methods are in the mix as well as the pay dispute as such. But at the heart of the dispute is an argument over whether holding down pay – and thus imposing a real cut in living standards – on working people is the only or even the best way to prevent a wage-price inflation spiral.

The first problem with even presenting it in that way is that current inflation is not the result of a wage-price spiral at all. It’s understandable that those who remember the inflation of the late 1970s would be keen not to return there, although it’s just possible that a government whose whole approach depends on expecting people to forget what they’ve done in the last 12 years might be pinning rather a lot of its hopes on people remembering what happened almost half a century ago and being suitably afraid as a result. The point, though, is that the causes of inflation now are rather different; even if the solution was the right one in the 1980s (itself highly debateable), it doesn’t follow that it’s the right one today.

The government are largely getting away with framing the terms of the argument, and Labour’s absolute terror of being seen to be supporting working people defending their standard of living is a complete gift to the Tories. Not only does it reinforce the Tory framing of the dispute, it also assists Tory stereotypes about the evil trades unions and alienates Labour from many of its own members and supporters. Dominic Raab has told us today that the government (which claims not to be a party to the dispute or to have any role in its resolution) “can’t allow … the unions … to win this argument”, as though ‘the unions’ are somehow an entity completely different from and divorced from the working people they represent. The Tory line is accompanied by misleadingly selected figures about how much the employees in dispute currently earn, in an attempt to suggest that they don’t ‘need’ an increase at all – a dishonest way of stating that they must accept a cut in living standards. The figures have, of course, been seized upon and repeated ad nauseum by people complaining that they (or nurses or some other ‘deserving’ group) earn less and aren’t getting a pay rise at all. They’ve been conned into a silly and ultimately self-defeating argument which focuses their ire on a different group of working people rather than on those who are orchestrating the attack on living standards.

It's true, of course, that some people earn less than some rail workers. It’s true, equally, that some of those lower paid people will get a wage rise lower than that asked for by the rail workers. It’s true that there may be some unfairness in both of those things. But extrapolating those facts to an argument that rail salaries must not be allowed to keep pace with inflation is an argument which justifies and supports the attack on their own living standards. Their ire would be better directed at those who are doing very well out of the misnamed ‘cost-of-living crisis’; the bankers gaining as a result of interest rate rises which generate extra profits for no extra work, or the oil giants benefiting from a wholly speculative price increase when their costs of extraction have changed not one iota. And, of course, the speculators and gamblers who so heavily fund the Tory Party. Just what does it take for the working people criticising the rail strike to realise that their own interests align more closely with those of the rail workers than those feeding them the lies?

Concentrating power

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The newspapers and their Tory friends have been milking the planned series of strikes over the next week for all they’re worth.  “Ruining Christmas” seems to be the more-or-less ‘official’ tabloid description; although I’m sure they’d have found a similarly pertinent title at any other time of the year.

I don’t doubt that the strikes will inconvenience many, and I’m equally sure that if I were depending on Southern Rail to get to work, or on BA to fly away for some Christmas sun, I’d be pretty unhappy about it too.  Unhappiness, and playing on people’s anger, sells newspapers.  To make the issue more complex, I’m not sure that I have a huge amount of sympathy with the grievances of the staff taking strike action in every case either; the issue of driver-only train operation, for instance, seems to have been resolved elsewhere, and I’m finding it hard to understand why what’s acceptable sometimes isn’t more generally acceptable.

But there’s an underlying issue here which isn’t really about the validity or otherwise of a particular grievance, it’s about where power lies and what rights working people have to pursue a dispute with their employer.  To listen to some of the Tories talking, they ‘accept’ the right of people to withdraw their labour, just so long as it causes no inconvenience to the employers or customers; the moment it does, it becomes a case of trade unions abusing their power.  And that in turn leads to demands to ban ever-increasing sections of the working population from ever going on strike.  But a right to withdraw labour only so long as it inconveniences no one doesn’t look like a particularly useful right to me – the whole point of any industrial action is to put pressure on the employer.  Striking, or threatening to strike, is effectively the only power that workers have.

What concerns me even more is the way in which people are being swept along with this attitude.  Finding angry commuters to interview is easy enough, but it’s no substitute for a consideration of the power politics underlying the question.  Ultimately, the Tories and their media friends are seeking to make the power balance between workers and employers even more one-sided than it is at present, and the presentation of the issue is effectively aligning workers in other industries and sectors with the employers.  Every time those workers who depend on the trains to get to work criticise the strikers, and demand that they don’t strike, they are effectively telling them that they must accept whatever the employers say and forgo any right to oppose it.

In an increasingly interconnected economy, the failure of services on which so many depend – whether because of a strike or for any other reason – is something which we would all prefer to avoid, naturally.  But the jump from there to handing all power to employers and telling employees that they must accept whatever is imposed on them is far too simplistic a response.  In recent decades, under Tory and Labour governments alike, the balance of power has swung very much away from employees, and those who wield the power are seeking to continue that process. 

I understand the argument that strikes should be a last resort, and that not all strikes will appear to have merit to everyone, but who should decide on the merits or otherwise of a particular dispute?  It’s a question which we can debate ad infinitum, and one on which our opinions will tend to depend in large measure on the impact any particular dispute has on us as individuals.  But the solution is surely a bit more complex than simply taking away employee rights and giving all power to employers.  I hope that ACAS will be able to help resolve the current disputes – that’s the best outcome for all concerned.  The alternative (and apparently popular) suggestion of further eroding the position of working people, and further accumulating power in the hands of the employers, doesn’t look to me to be in the long term interest of all those angry people being so willingly interviewed by the media, however much it might appear to be in their short term interest at a point in time.

Overheads and packages

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For decades, pension provision was seen and treated as part of an overall remuneration package.  Employees didn’t just get a salary, they got a package, and people thinking of changing jobs were encouraged to compare the total package, not just the headline salary. 

I’m aware that some employers even implemented flexible arrangements under which employees could, within agreed limits, sacrifice part of their salary for higher employer pension contributions, or even reduce the contributions for an increase in salary.  Such arrangements suited employees, who could vary the elements of the overall package at different points in their lives, and they were generally cost neutral (other than administration costs) for employers.  Above all, they encouraged people to think package rather than salary.

I’m not entirely sure at what point ‘part of the package’ became an ‘unaffordable overhead’ apparently provided by the employers out of the goodness of their hearts, but the perspective certainly changed.  Factors such as increasing longevity come into the equation, but I have a feeling that the crucial event was the raid on pension funds mounted by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor.

I’ve never felt that he was wrong in principle; the previous tax treatment of pension funds gave disproportionate benefit to the most well-off rather than the least well-off.  But he was wrong, and badly wrong, in practice, by introducing the change without warning and with no transitional period for both employers and employees to adjust to the significantly increased contributions which would be required from both if previous pension provision was to be maintained. 

Overnight, an approach to occupational pension provision which had been so successful over decades was rendered unviable.  The pensions crisis may be coming to the fore under a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, but the seeds were sown by Gordon Brown and New Labour.

The sleight of hand by which pension contributions have come to be regarded as an ‘overhead’ disguises the fact that employers reducing the benefits or increasing the level of employees' contributions are, in effect, reducing the total remuneration package of their employees as certainly as if they were simply reducing wages.  The wrath of those being hit by this attack is easily understandable.

The surprising thing to me is not that public sector employees are protesting so strongly, but that private sector employees did not protest more when the changes impacted them.  It underlines, perhaps, the extent to which economic power has become increasingly unbalanced in favour of capital and against labour.  However, the mere fact that private sector employees have already had to suffer the closure of final salary schemes and the prospect of reduced income after retirement is no basis at all for arguing that public sector employees should meekly accept the same fate.

It’s also often overlooked that not all public sector pension schemes are the same; some are much more actuarially sound than others, and there really is no need to treat them all on the same basis.  There are some serious problems though, particularly in those services where pensions are paid from current revenue rather than from a properly funded long term savings scheme.  Arguing that all schemes can just continue as they are is as disingenuous as arguing that they all have to change fundamentally.

What is surely clear overall is that we have a choice between reducing the size of pensions after retirement and increasing the amount saved before retirement.  The position we’ve got to seems to be that public sector employers are determined to make that decision unilaterally, just as private sector employers have already done.  It’s a short term decision though; it saves money today at the expense of potentially creating a bigger problem for pensioners in the future.

The government is giving conflicting messages as well.  On the one hand they say – quite rightly – that we need to save more to make provision for retirement, and on the other they seem likely to further postpone auto-enrolment in the new pension scheme because they want us to spend not save in order to boost the economy.  Long term needs conflict with short term ones, and as is usual with politicians, short term considerations are likely to win out.

Seeing pensions as part of a remuneration package rather than as an overhead puts potential industrial action by employees into its proper context.  There will have to be changes to the package in many cases, of course; but change should be negotiated not imposed, and public sector employees are right to insist on that.  That surely is at the heart of what trades unions are about.